Chapter 17
The letter was waiting for Ronan by the time they came inside, though Augusta did not notice it immediately.
Her attention was fixed upon her husband, who had gone so terribly quiet after hearing that Sarah could not be found that she almost wished he would shout, demand answers, or do anything instead of standing in the entrance hall like a statue.
A member of the staff approached before either of them could move farther into the house, holding out a folded sheet of paper with such reluctance that Augusta’s stomach tightened before he had spoken a word.
“Your Grace, this was left behind for you.”
Ronan looked at the letter, then at the man. “Left by whom?”
“We do not know, Your Grace,” the servant seemed confused themselves.
For the first time since they had stepped from the carriage, something openly dangerous entered Ronan’s expression.
It disappeared almost at once, but Augusta saw it; so, she suspected, did the servant, who lowered his gaze as Ronan took the paper from him.
She watched his face as his eyes moved over the page.
“Ronan?” she asked. “What does it say?”
His fingers tightened around the paper. “Whoever has Sarah wants me to meet him tomorrow.”
Augusta stared at him. “Tomorrow? Where?”
“The place that he has given is rather secluded,” he admitted. “But I recognize it, and it shouldn’t be too difficult to get there.”
“And what does he want?” Augusta felt worry flood her veins.
All she wanted in that moment was for Sarah to be okay.
Ronan looked at the letter again, as though the answer might have appeared since the last time he read it. “It does not say.”
“But that makes no sense,” she said. “If it were money, surely he would say so. Or if he wanted something from you, surely he would tell you what it was.”
Ronan was quiet.
Augusta searched his face. “Does he say anything about Sarah?”
This time Ronan’s silence lasted only a second, but it was the longest second of the night. “No.”
Nothing about whether Sarah was safe or about whether she had been frightened or hurt, whether she was warm. Augusta had never realized how many ordinary things there were to fear for a child until now.
Ronan folded the letter and turned as though he meant to go at once.
“Where are you going?” Augusta asked.
“To speak to the men searching the grounds.”
“They are already searching. What will you tell them that you have not already told them?”
He looked at her, his expression closing further. “I do not know, Augusta. But I should be doing something.”
She stepped closer and caught his sleeve before he could move away. “There is nothing you can do until morning.”
His jaw tightened.
“You are going to walk from room to room, ask the same questions again, and by morning you will have exhausted yourself without learning anything.”
Under any other circumstances, he might have argued. Augusta almost wanted him to. Instead, he looked at her for a long moment and then said, “What would you have me do?”
“Sit with me.”
The question in his eyes was almost absurd. Sit? While his daughter was missing? While there was a letter in his hand instructing him to meet a stranger in the morning?
“Yes,” Augusta said before he could object. “Sit. Worry, if you must, because heaven knows I cannot seem to stop doing it either. But do not spend the entire night punishing yourself. We have to be patient.”
Ronan’s gaze dropped briefly to his cane, then returned to her. “You have become very commanding.”
“I married a duke. I assumed some of it would transfer.”
“Fine then.”
She was surprised that he even agreed, but did not push her luck further by asking him more questions.
Neither of them seemed inclined to sit properly in the chairs. Augusta lowered herself onto the rug with none of the care she would ordinarily have given the skirts of her ball gown. Ronan sat beside her, stretching his injured leg toward the heat. The letter remained in his hand.
Augusta watched him read the letter again.
“You have already read it, why must you torture yourself all over again?”
“There may be something I missed.”
“I know that you’re thorough, so I cannot believe that you will have missed anything. Give it to me.”
His eyes moved to her. “Why?”
“So that you stop torturing yourself with it.”
Ronan set the letter on the rug between them. Once again, she was surprised that he had complied.
The fire settled with a low crack, and Augusta folded her hands in her lap. For several minutes neither of them spoke, though it was not a peaceful silence. The entire house seemed to be waiting with them.
Then Ronan said, “She will be frightened.”
Augusta turned her head.
He was looking into the fire. “Sarah tries not to show it when she is afraid. Have you noticed that? She becomes very quiet.”
“I know.” Augusta swallowed. “She is six.”
“She should be in bed.” His voice remained level, but his fingers had curled tightly against his knee.
“She should be asleep, and I should know where she is. Instead, she is somewhere with a man I do not know, and I cannot even tell you whether she has someone to comfort her because I have no idea what is happening to my own daughter.”
Augusta shifted closer. “You are going to find her.”
“How can you know that?”
“Because I know you,” she said without missing a beat. “I am frightened too, but I trust you to handle it. Whoever took her wants you to meet him tomorrow, which means whatever he intends is not finished tonight.”
Ronan looked back toward the flames. “That is what I have been telling myself.”
The silence returned, and when Ronan spoke again, there was no irritation in him at all. “I have not been a good father to her.”
“Why say that?” Augusta looked at him sharply. “It is what you are telling yourself because she is missing.”
“No.” He shook his head, slowly rather than defensively. “I have known it for some time. I simply had the luxury of believing I could repair it gradually.”
She did not interrupt him then. Ronan drew one knee up slightly, his other leg remaining extended before the fire.
”I made certain Sarah had everything she needed. If she needed something, I saw that she had it. I asked after her constantly and somehow persuaded it was the same thing as being with her.”
“You cared for her in the way you understood.”
His eyes shifted toward her.
“You were distant. I shall not tell you that you were a perfect father,” Augusta sighed. “But neither will I sit here and allow you to decide you never loved her simply because you did not know how to show it properly.”
His expression tightened. “She used to come to my study.”
Augusta went still.
“She would stand in the doorway,” he said, “and ask if I was busy. I always seemed to be doing something terribly important. Whatever happened to be on the desk in front of me became important enough that I could tell her I would see her later.”
“And did you?”
“Sometimes.”
The single word hurt more than she expected.
Ronan rubbed his thumb against the side of his hand. “The absurd thing is that I cannot remember what was so urgent but I remember her standing at the door.”
Augusta reached for his hand then, and Ronan let her take it.
“You loved her already,” Augusta said. “You simply thought providing for her was enough because that was the kind of father you knew how to be.”
“That does not excuse it.”
“Why must everything either excuse you or condemn you? I am certain that Sarah adores you.”
“She may not when…”
“When she comes home.” Augusta tightened her fingers around his. “When.”
A strange comfort arose, but it disappeared almost immediately when Ronan looked toward the letter again.
“Who takes a child?” Augusta asked after a while. “Why Sarah?”
“Because she guarantees I will go.” Ronan’s thumb moved absently against hers. “Whatever this is, it is about me.”
“You cannot think of anyone?”
“I know men who dislike me.”
“Someone with a grievance against the estate?” she said, trying to piece everything together.
“I cannot think of one serious enough.”
“Someone who wants revenge?”
“Possibly.”
They went in circles after that, and perhaps both knew they were doing it. A stranger who hated Ronan. Someone who wanted something he had not yet named. Someone who knew where Sarah would be and understood exactly what taking her would do to her father.
Augusta stared into the flames until something bright caught the corner of her eye.
The raven. Her gaze moved to Ronan’s cane.
She stared at it for several seconds before saying, “You still do not believe me about that.”
Ronan followed her eyes. “About what?”
“The man I saw that night had that cane.”
“A cane like it,” Ronan sighed. “We have discussed this.”
“I am certain that it was the same cane,” Augusta said. “I know that I was wrong about you, but I was not wrong about that.”
Ronan looked at her for a moment. “How can you be so sure?”
Augusta was not entirely sure how she could explain it to him any better than she already had. She had thought about that night many times since it happened, and she knew that there were several things she could have been mistaken about. But the cane was different.
“Because I remember it,” she replied. “Especially the raven.”
Ronan looked down at his cane.
“This cane,” he said, lifting it slightly from his lap, “was a gift from my father from when I was fifteen. There was a hunting competition on our land every autumn that the men of my family had taken part in for generations. I wanted, more than I have ever wanted anything, to make him proud of me. So I entered, though I had no business doing so at that age.”
“What happened?”
“I won.” His mouth curved, though there was no real humour in it. “But I fell from my horse taking the final jump and shattered my leg in the landing. It never healed as it ought to have. I have walked with a limp ever since, and I have needed a cane since I was sixteen years old.”
Augusta looked at his leg. Of course she knew that he had injured it when he was young, but fifteen suddenly seemed terribly young. She had never thought much about how old he had been when he first needed the cane. To Augusta it was simply something Ronan always carried.
He turned it over once in his hands. “My father had this one made for me not long after. The silver raven is the mark of Ravenhill. He told me he wanted the whole of the county to know precisely whose son had won that competition, disability and all. He was proud of me, Augusta.”
“That is a strange thing to be proud of,” she said softly. Especially when it had led to the injury. But she did not say that part out loud.
“He was not a man who valued caution.” A shadow crossed his face. “I understand now that it might have been the very worst gift he could have given a boy so desperate to please him.”
Augusta looked at him. “What was your relation with him like?”
“He was good to me,” he replied after a moment. “Whatever else may be said of him, I never doubted that he loved me, nor that he wished me to succeed him well. We were close, closer perhaps than a duke and his heir are meant to be. I never had cause to question it.”
“And your mother?”
The question seemed to cost him something to hear. Augusta watched him consider it.
“My mother stopped speaking to him,” he said. “I do not know what passed between them.”
”I asked once.” His voice had gone very quiet. “She told me it was not a matter for children, and that I ought to be grateful my father loved me as he did, whatever else he was. I’ve thought about it a lot since in the years that have passed but have never once been able to make sense of it.”
“A quarrel, perhaps,” Augusta ventured. “Something neither of them could forgive.”
“Perhaps,” he mused, “I did not have many companions my own age, you understand. I had my studies, and my father’s approval to chase, very little room in a day for anything else.
At the time, I did not think of it as a deprivation.
I only wanted to make him proud. It did not occur to me to wonder what I was missing until I was a great deal older, and by then it seemed a foolish thing to mourn. ”
Augusta felt something ache in her chest that she could not entirely name.
“I cannot imagine it,” she admitted. “A house so quiet and your mother who would not say why.”
“Nor could I, and I lived it.” He attempted something like a smile. “I do not know why I am telling you all of this now, of all nights.”
They sat like that a long while, the fire dwindling.
Augusta did not know when she fell asleep against his shoulder, only that she woke to find grey morning light creeping in beneath the curtains, and Ronan already risen, already dressed, a pistol in his hand and the letter from the night before folded hard into his coat pocket.
“Ronan.” She was on her feet before she had entirely decided to be. “You cannot mean to go alone.”
“I mean to bring my daughter home,” he said, and there was nothing in his voice now of the boy who had spoken of his mother by the fire.
This was the Duke of Ravenhill entire, cold and immovable as the raven on his cane.
“The letter was plain enough on that point. I go alone, or I do not get her back at all.”
“Then let me come as far as….”
“No.” He crossed the room to her, and for a moment the hardness in his face gave way to something else. “If this does not end as I intend it to, I need you here. For Sarah’s sake, if she is returned to this house and finds no one waiting for her.”
He touched her cheek, just once, just briefly, as though he could not quite permit himself more than that. “I will come back,” he said. “I intend to. But if the worst should happen, you are to take her far from here. Do you understand me?”
She did not trust herself to speak, so she nodded instead, and watched him check the pistol a final time, and walk out into the pale morning to meet whatever waited for him there.